human services – Engaging Peace

By Kathie MM

Engaging Peace is delighted to announce that Dr. Doe West, one of its newest Board of Directors members, has just earned major recognition for her accomplishments on behalf of social justice for the most oppressed members of our society. She has been named a Lifetime Achiever by Marquis Who’s Who.

In this post, we share some of the accomplishments that led to this honor. In our next few posts, we will be sharing her perspectives on violence, nonviolence, apology, and forgiveness in the wake of the recent Las Vegas mass shooting.

Dr. West received an MS from Boston University and a PhD in Law, Policy & Society from Northeastern University. As a Native American Scholar, she was awarded an Advanced Minority Fellowship for her dissertation, a widely respected work on bioethics.

In addition to her PhD in Law, Policy & Society, Dr. West also holds a Master of Divinity, and has nearly completed a doctorate in Religious Philosophy. The two doctoral degrees reflect her belief that work and faith in union are the foundations of social justice.

Dr. West wears many hats in her commitment to the generation of social justice. She is currently a full-time tenured professor and program chair in the human services department of the School of Public Service and Social Sciences at Quinsigamond Community College. She also serves in teaching and consulting roles at Bay Path University and Assumption College.

Dr. West has served in ministerial or pastoral roles at Quincy City Hospital and Charlton’s Overlook Lifespan Community; her home church is the First Congregational Church of Woodstock, CT.

Among Dr. West’s early achievements was work that led to the current Americans with Disabilities Act. Her work with the City of Boston’s Department of Health and Hospitals helped create national guidelines for reasonable accommodation and definition of undue hardship. She was the first Commissioner of Handicap Affairs and 504 compliance officer for Boston, and worked with Senator Edward Kennedy to ensure that historic Faneuil Hall was accessible to people with disabilities.

As a social justice activist, Dr. West has served as executive director of Social Action Ministries. She has worked with the Massachusetts Housing & Shelter Alliance and provided “street ministry” for homeless individuals in the Boston Common area.

As a mental health advocate, she worked with the New England Family Study on familial schizophrenia, and coauthored the book Coping+Plus: Dimensions of Disability. Further publications can be found at her Marquis Lifetime Achiever website as well as https://doewestmsmdivphd.academia.edu.

"Tax Dollars" poster — Poster by Eric Gulliver, 2011

With April 15 (Tax Day in the U.S.) looming, I consider myself to have three moral obligations:

Pay taxes that can provide funding for many vital programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, public transportation, human services, education, environmental protections, and veterans’ benefits.
Protest tax policies that further entrench the rich and powerful while robbing the poor, depleting the middle class, and killing innocent people in the names of profit and national security.
Protest policies allowing huge corporations like General Electric to make billions of dollars in profits from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while paying NO federal taxes.

To find out where your tax payments go, check out the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL). According to their analysis, out of each dollar paid in federal income taxes in 2010, 39 cents went to fund current and past wars. This is probably an underestimate.

The federal budget deficit has been growing alarmingly since 2001, and it makes sense to look for ways to trim expenditures. But ask yourself, is it moral, is it just, and in the long run is it wise to cut the budgets for programs such as Social Security, job training, and Head Start, while keeping the Pentagon budget “off the table” and maintaining enormous tax breaks for the wealthy (e.g., through recent tax cuts on millionaires’ estates).

For a detailed breakdown of how social programs could be saved if some of the tax breaks for the rich were reduced, see the Center for American Progress.

In last year’s “weak economy,” hundreds of new billionaires emerged in this country while more and more people were losing their jobs and homes and falling below the poverty line. Is this what you want your taxes and current tax policies to support?

Finally, I have some suggestions:

Go to the FCNL page to learn more about how your taxes are spent and to retrieve a toolkit that will give you some ideas about how you can get involved
Participate in Global Day of Action on Military Spending, April 12, 2011.

To get some idea about what a cutback in military spending could accomplish, watch this video:

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology